Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

New Server: Welcome to the New (less expensive) Server! Find any problems? Report them here.

I’ve got all of the base game mechanics done, the goal of the game is to grow your crops, but to do this you need water! And there is none, so you kill rabbits, and use their blood to water your crops.

I’ll get some final touches done if I can, but I’m pretty drained after all of that assembly..

Time is closing in and things aren’t going the way I’d like, having a lot of trouble with emulators as each one gives slightly different results with the game. Though, I did manage to implement some basic collision, so you can kill the rabbits now. They also come from both sides of the screen. Writing a game in z80 assembly has definitely been..interesting, I might do something like this again next LD, it has been fun.

Hopefully only a few things left to implement before I can consider my game mechanics done, after that it’s just any finishing touches if I get time.

Greetings from the Victory Garden team. For our Mini LD 50 submission, we demade Red Hook Game’s upcoming squad management roguelike Darkest Dungeon, in the style of a Gameboy classic! The game’s not been released yet, so we had to take liberties here and there, but we did our best to stay true to the spirit of the game. Feel free to share your feedback and High Scores over on the project page!

There are a lot more features we wanted to get to, including more monsters, Camp and passive Party Leader skills, a surface and dungeon shops, and a classic Text String save feature. If people like this well enough, we’ll put together a Post-Compo Version with these features and more. But after a few day’s rest… it’s been intense!

…or the stone tile floor, as the case may be.

All assets, design, and the game engine itself were produced for the Mini LD 50 Jam. Other than a pre-existing Java code base, and a handful of graphical assets, all content and features were created within 72 hours (with a small break taken between sessions, because it was a practice run). The game was coded using LWJGL, and managed via Trello. Audio was produced using BFXR, Reaper, and featured the Elder Thing VST plugin. Story stylistic development was inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Character names came from Behind The Name.com, and additional names and literary references run the gamut from European and Greek Mythology, classic Combat RPGs, and H.P. Lovecraft, to works of gothic literature

If you like our stuff, feel free to check out our new devblog, Victory Garden Games, where we’ll be talking about LD plans, as well as some of our upcoming projects! Thanks a ton, and I hope you have a great time playing our game.

In this 48 hour competition, participants created video games from scratch based on the theme of “10 seconds.” I had a difficult time deciding on a solid idea for my entry, discarding ideas like:

A timed destroy the targets test.

10 second dungeon crawler.

Time traveling machine with a range of 10 seconds.

I finally settled on an idea based on Simon Says, a game which everyone already knows how to play. This is important because 10 seconds doesn’t allow you much time to teach new rules. The goal was to help players grasp the game’s rules quicker before they get frustrated by the time limit.

My idea combines 2D platforming and Simon Says, an idea inspired by Wario Land II and the Simon memory game that you unlock after beating the game. I also drew artistic inspiration from that game, adopting a retro Gameboy look.

What Went Wrong

I struggled a lot more with time this competition than with the last competition. I worked 5 hours Friday night and 9 hours Sunday morning for a total of 14 hours. There are several aesthetic bugs left in the final product due to not having time to work on the game on Saturday.

If I had another 5 hours to work on the game, I would have ironed out the visual appeal of the game by fixing bugs, adding particle effects, adding scan lines, and improving animations. Another aspect that suffered due to time is the unclear game directions. I planned to implement a graphical cue to let players know when a condition is met or failed, but that did not make it into the game.

Currently, the only thing that hints success or failure are sound clips which do not sufficiently get the point across. New players will be lost, not knowing if they are winning or loosing until the end. However, I could be wrong. It will be interesting to hear the feedback I get on this game.

What (I Think) Went Right

I was happy with the graphics for the most part. The character design was something I did in the tail end of development. The name of the game was coined somewhere along development as I scampered around the level in testing trying to accomplish rapidly appearing demands like a small bird with short attention span who flutters about with no obvious goal or purpose. I settled for implying a story with the title rather than spelling everything out for the player to maintain the simplicity needed for such short play sessions.

I was happy with the main character’s walking animation and sound effects. They’re kind of derpy, and it makes me happy. Although I’m not sure if I pulled my original vision for the game, I was proud of my concept, and it’s an idea I think I will return to some day when I have more time.

My tools of choice in making this game included Unity 3D, Graphics Gale, and Photoshop. I used the platforming framework I posted via Youtube for most of the player physics. I also constructed a horribly inefficient 2D sprite generator for this game using techniques I need to research more.